If you buy into the hype, GenAI is one of the greatest human inventions of the past 50 years. For the advertising industry, GenAI offers unbridled potential to transform the way work is done. It also threatens tens of thousands of creative jobs. Should we embrace this new technology, or fear it?
TURKEYS DON’T VOTE FOR CHRISTMAS
Last year, Forrester predicted that due to the rise of GenAI, advertising agencies will shed 7.5% of their jobs by 2030. The report concluded that approximately one-third of these job losses, or 11,000 roles, will be directly attributable to the rise of GenAI.
This past March, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, predicted significant attrition across agency land. “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” he joked, adding that areas like media planning and buying will be hit particularly hard: “The days when we rely on a 25-year-old media planner and buyer will be over.”
But it’s not just media planners and buyers who should be concerned. Looking at recent GenAI advances such as Google Gemini, SORA, and DALL.E, all of which make it very easy for anyone to create images, text, video, or music, designers suddenly appear very vulnerable to replacement.
HAS THE DESIGN CULL STARTED?
Looking at the recent slump in demand for creative work, it’s tempting to blame GenAI. “People are beginning to lose work, sometimes finding themselves in the odd position of competing with their synthetic avatars for jobs,” explained Laurence Bouvard, an actress and voiceover artist.
“[The] community of design leaders is now facing a crisis of confidence, as their value in the market has seemingly shifted in this moment of economic uncertainty,” explains a recent article in Fast Company. Many analysts predict growth in design jobs will be flat over the next 10 years, with most of the openings replacing those who retire or switch careers.
JOBS VERSUS TASKS
Regardless of whether you believe GenAI is to blame, we can all agree it does some things exceptionally well. This includes reviewing vast sums of information at high speeds, finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, churning out repetitive tasks, or synthesizing information from large data sets. GenAI can do these things much better, and faster, than any human.
A study published in HBR found that more than half of all workplace tasks may be impacted by GenAI, encompassing 44% of all working hours. The article posits that tasks with recurring processes are candidates for full automation with GenAI, while tasks that require creative reasoning, collaboration, and judgment are simply candidates for augmentation.
GREAT AT LAUNDRY, BAD AT ART (OR WRITING)
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes,” quipped author Joanna Maciejewska in a recent meme. AI in its current form is best suited to doing repetitive, mindless tasks like laundry and dishes. So, unless Maciejewska’s art consists of derivative works stolen from other artists, she is going to be okay.
Let’s take a look at writing. Sure, bots can certainly churn out boat loads of vanilla copy for SEO. But any decent writer will tell you that the most important part of writing is the research and thinking that go into it, not the writing itself per se. The process of learning about a complex subject from various sources, both primary and secondary, takes a lot of effort. GenAI is simply not up to the task.
PIXEL PUSHING BITES THE DUST
A big reason the job market for designers has slowed down is because many companies that employ these roles—especially UI/UX designers—significantly over-hired during the pandemic, and they have been working to reduce this bloated headcount over the past couple years.
“Technology companies are still trying to reduce the extra weight they put on during the pandemic, given that high interest rates and the negative trend in the technology sector have lasted longer than expected,” reported Bloomberg. Other roles have been impacted, too, especially product managers and marketers.
While designers may be loath to admit it, a good portion of the work they do consists of resizing banners, changing icon colors, and making new versions of work to update corporate messaging. This is the less glamorous side of UI/UX, which is often referred to with derision as “pixel pushing.”
This type of work is being gutted by AI. This has further caused the supply of paying design work to contract, causing a classic supply-demand crunch. This crunch comes at an inopportune time following the historic boom during which demand for design expanded dramatically and many new practitioners entered the field.
“Ongoing layoffs and market instability have reduced the bargaining power that many designers wielded in the previous decade—and have cast a light on the transactional aspect of our work,” explained State of UX 2024. Given the dip in demand, it’s not surprising metrics have collapsed for design teams. Given poor team performance, many design leaders are being made scapegoats.
SO, WHAT’S NEXT?
The boom years are over, and being able to keep a large team of designers busy pixel pushing is a thing of the past. This will make it a lot more difficult to build a high-performing team in a professional services environment where having a large headcount and high utilization are paramount.
Design leaders will need to recalibrate how teams are structured, with a greater emphasis on brand strategy, creative design, and storytelling—tasks better suited to people. Designers can console themselves that there remains ample demand for high-value creative work.
Design leaders should begin preparing for a new normal by building smaller teams of designers equipped with GenAI to do many of the tasks currently being done by junior team members. They should focus on core creative strengths, and seek to be viewed as critical thinkers and strategists with a seat at the corporate table.